Abstract
There is a gap in the historiography of youth punishment in the United States in the period “from the Great Depression to the Great Society” (p. 8), yet this is a crucial period to study in part because of shifts in public perceptions and models of youth and childhood and the emergence of legally and socially structured forms of racial stratification and oppression that happened during this time. Carl Suddler seeks to fill this gap through his focus on the case study of Black youth in the justice system in New York from 1930 until the late 1960s. Suddler's work contributes to our knowledge about the key socio-legal forces in criminalizing young Black people, and charts the history of resistance to racialized forms of criminalization.
Suddler draws from archival research, including an analysis of public discourse about youth crime and offending, to shed light on the structure and functioning of punishment in the period after the Great Depression, analysing key debates in the court context about the role of social history and ‘race’ in sentencing, and the contributions of the first Black female judge in America, Justice Jane Bolin, who served on the New York City Domestic Relations Court. He then analyzes the phenomenon of street crime in wartime Harlem, examining the role of citizen-led resistance to overpolicing and criminalization, as well as the evolution of the ‘hoodlum’ narrative about Black youth. His work focuses on the ways that social scientific disciplines, the public media, and legal authorities came together to construct Black youth criminality. Finally, his book uses the case study of a group of young Black men from Harlem—the Harlem Six—whose wrongful conviction in 1965 sheds light on the broader context of post-war overpolicing of young Black men.
Linking to important earlier work on the role of social science disciplines in contributing to the criminalization of Blackness (Muhammad, 2010), Suddler traces the history of ideas about ‘prevention’ and ‘treatment’ during this period, and how they constructed images of delinquency. For example, he writes about the foundation of the Police Athletic League as a crime prevention program that emerged in the 1930s in part in response to theories that delinquency could be prevented through young people's engagement in recreation. Yet Suddler details the ways that preventative organizations and strategies like this became a vehicle for the expansion of surveillance of young people, particularly racialized young people. He also charts the development of the Lafargue clinic, which opened its doors in Harlem in 1946, and was aimed at providing Black New Yorkers with mental health support, building on the psy-disciplines’ emerging interest “in the psychological roots of prejudice and discrimination” and the connections between “inadequate social conditions” and “biological characteristics” (p. 88). Suddler charts the ways that the clinic sought to offer preventative assistance to young people who might later be deemed delinquent, and filled some gaps in care that emerged because of racism in the broader health care system. However, he also points to the ways that the clinic was a “participant in the postwar criminalization of black youths in Harlem” (p. 92) in part because of its positivist emphasis on identifying the roots of delinquency in and through a child's mental pathologies.
Suddler powerfully details the multiple ways that Black citizens of New York pushed back against these narratives of criminalization, through his study of Black newspapers and public debate and discourses, as well as the work of activists like Adam Clayton Powell. He details the public debates following the 1943 ‘riots’ in response to the death of Robert Bandy, a Black military police officer who stepped to the defense of a Black woman who was arrested for disorderly conduct on the Upper West Side, and the open public debates about the racial inequalities in New York City which may have precipitated the riots, including the perspectives of young Black people and their experiences of ongoing police brutality and violence. He also analyses the work of the Young Communist League in challenging public media narratives of muggings by young Black people, in interesting parallels to the work of Black British scholar Stuart Hall and others (Hall et al., 1986) on the potent image of the Black mugger in British life.
In the Afterword of his book, Suddler writes a reflective piece about historical continuity through the lens of the Trayvon Martin case and his own grappling with questions of “reading too much of the present in the past” (p. 154). His work so importantly contends with projects of resistance, even in the absence of a strong historical record. However, I am also curious about how Suddler grapples with historical discontinuities and the extent to which the criminalization of Black youth has also changed in its structure and functioning over time.
A tension I grappled with in the book concerns the enduring struggle around the uses (and misuses) of social science and the psy- disciplines in entrenching essentializing perspectives on race. Here, Suddler's work was in conversation with important work by Murakawa (2014) about police reforms proposed in the post-war era which constructed Black citizens as incubators of violence. I was curious to learn more about how Suddler might have also contended with the emerging discourses of developmental psychology and studies of ‘youth,’ and how these intersected with issues of class and gender, in his analysis of intervention efforts aimed at young people in conflict with the law.
Suddler's work helps us to understand the ways that projects of prevention and protection became vehicles for racialized surveillance and control, and provides us with an important contribution to the history of youth punishment.
